Chapter 28: A Mighty Fortress

ALICIA

I first checked for locks to pick, but the door was free from any holes or indentations. There was nothing in the way of tumblers and no keys to insert. The door appeared solid to all forms of penetration, but then I had a thought. I started working through the motions of the 103-form Yang style. After I finished, the door lit up and disappeared. It was obvious why this should work. For lack of a better phrase, because it should. The Tao was mysterious and all-emcompassing, it accepted everything and thus everything was able to accept it. For this reason, I knew that such a door that had no keys involved would naturally give way.

Inside the building an iron gate blocked the entrance forward in the lobby. I tried to climb the metal fencing, but the wall went from so short that a child could climb over it to impossibly high. To the right of the gate, I noticed a small series of circular trays. Obviously, the maker of this gateway had played Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, and the idea of setting up a castle keyed to several sections before the main one could be opened was appealing. And so, we had to scatter throughout the complex to find various orbs to put into the tray.

The yellow orb involved a long illusory maze. This illusion was not of magic, but through the use of mirrors and perspective. Autumntwig eventually figured it out, but she made it a point to use her earth powers to smash every single mirror, as the puzzle irritated the hell out of her. After that, she simply walked the maze, and found a spot that was out of place, pulled a lever and collected the orb.

The blue orb was in a room filled with water. Marina fought off some sea creatures and dove deep underwater to grab the item. I later noticed that there was a lever on the other side of the room and a platform across, and anyone attempting to do this puzzle wasn't supposed to be an actual mermaid. Oh well.

The gray orb was guarded by a Rube Goldberg puzzle. A series of cranks pulled some giant steel balls up a slope in buckets, then dropped them off where they rolled down a hill. As the rolled past, they turned gears, which moved a circular bar, which in turn added momentum to a series of spinning fans that guarded the before the steel made it back to the buckets. The spinning motion of the fans in turn moved the buckets. It was a rather impossible perpetual motion machine, but somehow despite grossly violating all possible laws of thermodynamics, the machine continued moving without overheating or draining itself of energy. Aellisa was fascinated why this could be, but eventually Rena poked her, and she sighed. A quick reshaping of the wood and metal and the gray orb dropped from its spot, where she scooped it up.

The red orb was guarded by large amounts of lava and fire, and sat on a pillar high in the room. Rena worked Javert through how to use her power, and she made steps leading up toward the pillar in a loose spiral. But the room was still very hot, so Rena used one of her racial powers called Firefox in order to surround her body with a shell of heat so that the contrast would not hurt her body. Firefox was powerful, fast, and secure just like the browser of the same name, and not like that crappy Google Chrome browser. Yes, I just did free advertising, now gimme money. In case, Rena made it all the way up to the top of the room, jumped down, and then killed the human torch effect so that the red orb wasn't going to hurt if it was touched later.

The last orb was green, and was guarded by a wooden dummy. The dummy somehow shrugged off damage from all spells, as demonstrated when Rena tried to burn it to the ground. It also copied movements, making it difficult to pass. It seemed an easy solution to simply outnumber it, but when we did, an equal number of dummies blocked our path. Was I nothing more than a dummy?!? While I dealt with this existential crisis, Arboria tried her hand, creating wood vines to hold it in place, and then infesting it with wood rot. The dummy crumbled into dust, and she continued onward, grabbing the last one. We now were clear to insert these keys into the gate.

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